Joining up health and social care: new report from the Audit Commission

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The Audit Commission have published the second in a series of briefings looking at adult social care.

At a time when the whole of the public sector must find significant savings, the report says that integrated working across health and social care offers opportunities for efficiencies and improvements to services. Without it, there is a risk of duplication and ‘cost-shunting’ where savings made by one organisation or sector create costs for others. And a lack of integrated working means that people are less likely to receive the best care.

But the briefing also finds that the NHS and councils have made patchy progress in improving this joint working across health and social care.

The briefing offers guidance to local partnerships, setting out a list of questions to consider, and suggestions for interventions that might help. Case studies show how some areas have embraced partnership working and used local data and benchmarking to establish how and where to make improvements.

NHS and social care partnerships can benchmark their performance against others by using the tool that accompanies the briefing.

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Andre Tomlin

André Tomlin is an Information Scientist with 20 years experience working in evidence-based healthcare. He's worked in the NHS, for Oxford University and since 2002 as Managing Director of Minervation Ltd, a consultancy company who do clever digital stuff for charities, universities and the public sector. Most recently André has been the driving force behind the Mental Elf and the National Elf Service; an innovative digital platform that helps professionals keep up to date with simple, clear and engaging summaries of evidence-based research. André is a Trustee at the Centre for Mental Health and an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London Division of Psychiatry. He lives in Bristol, surrounded by dogs, elflings and lots of woodland!

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